Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [251]
Even before the French realized this, British actions aroused their suspicions. French Catholics had been dismayed when British forces under General Sir Edmund Allenby swept the Turks out of Jerusalem just before Christmas 1917. The “Protestant peril” was taking over the Holy Land. The French colonial lobby watched anxiously as the Egyptian pound became the currency first in Palestine and then in Syria, and trade flowed south. When Picot rushed to Palestine to try to protect French interests, he found Allenby and his staff uncooperative. In the summer of 1918, as the last great German offensive battered the Western Front and the British prepared another major offensive into Syria, the Quai d’Orsay warned that French public opinion would not accept that “France be deprived of benefits which were rightfully hers by those who diverted their troops at the crucial moment.” French anxiety was not allayed by the subsequent refusal of the British military authorities to hand over full powers to French representatives in the areas of Syria earmarked for France under Sykes-Picot. The British also kept an ominous silence about their long-term plans. Picot, less hard-line than many of his colleagues, tried to warn Sykes of the mood in France: “The spiteful see it as evidence of hidden intentions. Even the others are becoming anxious.” The British refused to take French concerns or Picot himself seriously: “rather a vain and weak man,” said one officer, “jealous of his own position and of the prestige of France.”11
Although the British and the French acted as though the Middle East was theirs to quarrel over, they did have to pay some attention to their allies. The vague promises that had been made to Italy during the war— promises of access to ports such as Haifa and Acre; of a say in the administration of Palestine; of equal treatment in the Arabian peninsula and the Red Sea—could be safely ignored and generally were. The United States was a different matter. While Wilson assumed that the Arabs would need guidance, presumably from Britain and France, he took seriously the idea of consulting the wishes of the locals. “Every territorial settlement involved in this war,” he had said to Congress in his “Four Principles” speech of February 11, 1918, “must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned.” Gaston Domergue, a former minister of colonies and vice chairman of the official French committee to formulate France’s colonial aims, quite rightly exclaimed, “The obstacle is America!” 12
With a smooth shift of gears, the Europeans began to talk the language of the Americans. It was quite clear, said Domergue, that “we need a colonial empire to exercise, in the interests of humanity, the civilizing vocation of France.” The British were equally adept at putting old imperial goals in appealing new clothes. It would not do to upset the Americans; as Smuts told his colleagues on the Eastern Committee: “You do not want to divide the loot; that would be a wrong policy for the future.” On the other hand, if the Americans could be persuaded that the British were respecting Arab wishes, they might put pressure on the French to give up some of what they had been promised under Sykes-Picot. Cecil, high-minded and devious, warned that “the Americans will only support us if they think we are going in for something in the nature of a native Government.” Curzon concurred: “If we cannot get out of our difficulties in any other way we ought to play self-determination for all it is worth, wherever we are involved in difficulties with the French, the Arabs, or anybody else, and leave the case to be settled by that final argument knowing in the bottom of our hearts that we are more likely to benefit from it than is anybody else.